In the modern industry, typically a plurality of production equipments (i.e., peripheral devices) in charge of different production processes are included. In order to understand the production progress of the different equipments and the parameters of the equipments themselves, the equipments shall be monitored using a host computer. At present, the communication between the host computer and peripheral devices are usually realized via the serial ports of the control cabinet. That is, the control cabinet communicates with the peripheral devices via the serial ports to obtain data from the peripheral devices, and the control cabinet communicates with the host computer via the serial ports to transfer the data obtained from the peripheral devices to the host computer.
With diversity of the data transmission in industrial production, the amount of the serial ports in the control cabinet may not meet the requirement for data transfer among the control cabinet and the host computer and peripheral devices. There are two common solutions: firstly, increasing the amount of the serial ports in the control cabinet; secondly, using the transmission packet protocol analysis, i.e. one serial port in the control cabinet communicates with two or more serial port devices (including the host computer and the peripheral devices) at the same time, wherein the different serial port devices are distinguished through different packet protocol analysis.
The first solution leads to increased costs and hardware volume, the second one suffers from a case there the data from two serial port devices are mixed which causes unrecognizable code due to parse error.
Thus, a technical problem remains in the present field about how to conduct reliable communication among the control cabinets, the host computer and the peripheral devices without increasing the equipment costs and hardware volume.